Canva
How Fusion Books, an Australian yearbook publishing company, kickstarted a $26 billion company with a mission to make design simpler.
💡 Idea Validation - Aha Moment
💡 Building with Early Users
💡 Doing hings that don’t scale
🏢 The Company
Canva is a graphic design platform that allows users to easily create professional-looking graphics and designs without the need for extensive design skills or software.
“Canva helps regular people create cool designs.”
✨ The Initial Idea
It all began when Melanie Perkins recognized something while teaching design to Perth university students. The design tools were far too complex for the average person (a.k.a non-designers), and she believed the future world would have everyday people needing simple, flexible design tools to suit their needs.
“I thought that in the future, it would all be online and collaborative and much simpler than these really hard tools.”
🧪 Testing the Idea
In order to create a viable business and find product-market fit based off this idea, she knew she would have to test out her intuition. To do that, she had to reframe the concept as a hypothesis to validate, likely in the following way:
- We can build a design program that is straightforward, intuitive and robust.
- Non-designers would be interested and have specific needs for designing themselves.
- That need was strong enough for them to spend their own time instead of the added cost and management of hiring professional designers.
From this set of questions, they’d also define who specifically would be best to target first.
🏆 Building the MVP
To tackle the first two questions, they got to work with a focused use case in a space they knew well as university students: textbooks. They launched Fusion Books, a textbook publishing company they built up over a 5-year period. This allowed them to focus on one specific niche within their grand idea and something they knew textbook publishers would understand and want: an easy-to-use self-serve design software to publish their own textbooks each year.
This initial release gave them confidence they could build something non-designers were interested in and capable of leveraging themselves. In order to become a venture-backed startup, and deliver on their vision - they knew they would have to expand their use case. Let’s focus there.
This brought on a new question to validate, their differentiator:
- “Our goal was to take the entire design ecosystem, integrate it into one page, and then make it accessible to the whole world”
They would need a wedge into the market that showed promise along with a route to scale. So, who would this differentiator fit best for to start with?
- It turns out, small business owners inherently needed quick, easy-to-use tools and had to adapt to changing technologies. And yes, they found their time better spent here than hiring out professional designers.
- They honed in on the best early use case, which coincided with Facebook growth… Facebook images for business pages. They found PMF with this group but to gain a stronger fit as with any product, they had to iterate:
In order for Canva to take off — we had to get every person who came into our product to have a great experience in a couple of minutes. We needed to change their own self belief about their design abilities, we needed to give them design needs and we needed to make them feel happy and confident clicking around. We needed to get them to explore and play in Canva. No short order! So we spent months perfecting the onboarding experience paying particular attention to users’ emotional journey. — MP”
🚀 Growth & PMF
They restricted growth early on by gating the tool with a waitlist. As they gained traction with early users, word spread and they grew the Beta waitlist… They grew it even faster by offering earlier access to those who tweeted about Canva. On top of that, by focusing on designs for Facebook, it became their distribution channel in itself. They doubled down on this by making it incredibly easy for users to share the design on any social platform (e.g. Facebook, Twitter etc.).
It only took a 1 year to get to 2m users and you know the rest.
💡 Startersss Tips
- Intuition and conviction are extremely important in building early-stage products, but pairing it with listening to users can increase your chances of being right. - First Round Capital
- Canva, more than most companies, had validated Problem-Solution Fit early in their journey… through Fusion Books growing into Australia’s leading self-publishing textbook company and the early 50,000-person waitlist traction they were able to garner from “consumer designers”.
- Ideally you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you can't expect to hit that right away. Initially you have to choose between satisfying all the needs of a subset of potential users, or satisfying a subset of the needs of all potential users. Take the first. It's easier to expand userwise than satisfactionwise.
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